In Depth:  history

history

Michael Haykin

The church in North Africa was a leading centre of Christianity throughout the Ancient World. It was only with the conquests of Islam in the seventh century that this witness was quenched forever. Thankfully, much of the literary witness of the Christian authors of those centuries – from men and women like Tertullian, Perpetua, Cyprian, and Augustine – has survived.

In this column this year, we have been thinking about the matter of martyrdom in the Ancient Church. This month we think about the witness of the Carthaginian Cyprian, or, to give him his full name, Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus (c.200‒258). He had been radically converted from a lifestyle of public prominence, luxury and wealth in his early forties and subsequently served as the bishop of Carthage for about a decade. His leadership was especially important during the first empire-wide persecution of the church, initiated by the Emperor Decius (c.201‒251).

history

Michael Haykin

In the year 201 the Roman Emperor, Septimius Severus, who had become the head of the empire in 197, issued an edict forbidding anyone to become a Jew or a Christian. The Roman governor in Carthage in North Africa, Publius Aelius Hilarianus, a man who was steeped in Roman idolatry and paganism, was eager to enforce the edict.

And so, immediately prior to some gladiatorial games celebrating the birthday of Septimius Severus’ son Geta, in March 203, he had a number of Christians arrested. Eventually six were put on trial: four men – Saturninus and Secundulus, who were slaves, Revocatus, and their teacher, Saturus – and two women – Felicitas (or Felicity) and Vibia Perpetua, a noble-born Roman matron who was 22 years old with a newborn son.

history

Michael Haykin

In February many will celebrate St Valentine’s Day with gifts of flowers and maybe chocolates to their loved ones.

The association of romantic love with St Valentine’s Day dates back to Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, but the actual figure after which this saint’s day is named comes from the early centuries of the Church. Details of his life are shrouded in the mists of history. Indeed, it may well be that there are actually two different Christian figures by the name of Valentine. Whether one or two, there is good evidence that the church remembered one of them as an early Christian martyr. Our Saint Valentine was an Italian bishop who was martyred on 14 February, 269, after a trial before the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (reign 268–270).

history

Michael Haykin

Many of us will sing these marvellous words this Christmas from the carol O Come, All Ye Faithful, that was first printed in English in 1751: “God of God, Light of Light, Lo! he abhors not the Virgin’s womb; Very God, Begotten not created.”

The first and third lines of this stanza, the second in the hymn, are clearly dependent upon the wording of the creedal statement issued by the Council of Nicaea (325). They bear witness to the ongoing significance of this turning-point in the history of the church.

history

Michael Haykin

In the early 320s, the political relationship between the co-emperors of the Roman Empire, Constantine and Licinus, was falling apart.

Although he had been committed to a policy of religious toleration, Licinus had begun a limited persecution of Christians in 321 or 322, which became a pretext for war between himself and Constantine, a professing Christian.

history

Michael Haykin

This year is the 1,700th anniversary of one of the great turning-points in church history, the Council of Nicaea (325), which was called to deal with a matter that was of the highest importance: Who is the God who has revealed Himself in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth?

The quest to answer this question is deeply rooted in the Scriptures, where, as the American Presbyterian theologian, Benjamin B. Warfield, once put it, the “doctrine of the Trinity lies … in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view”.

history

Michael Haykin

Under the powerful ministry of Daniel McPhail’s preaching, the church at Osgoode flourished.

When McPhail became the pastor of the church, there were 60 members. A year later, the membership had increased to 76. By the annual assembly of the Ottawa Association in 1846, at which McPhail preached the introductory sermon, the Osgoode church had 99 members. A dozen years later, this had nearly doubled to 192.

history

Michael Haykin

It was during the Ottawa Valley revival of 1834–1835, which was narrated in last month’s column, that the Scottish-Canadian, Daniel McPhail, became certain of a call to vocational ministry.

He lacked the funds, however, to pursue formal theological education. Providentially, as he was shopping one day in nearby St Andrews East (now Saint-André-d’Argenteuil), the Presbyterian postmaster of the settlement, Guy Richards, offered to provide the money he needed for schooling as well as for the support of his mother and siblings while he was away from home.

history

Michael Haykin

It was in the depths of a Canadian winter – on 17 February, 1836 – that various delegates from six Baptist churches met in Montreal to form the Ottawa Baptist Association.

While two of the churches were based in Montreal (an Anglophone work and a French-speaking congregation), the others came from what was a considerable distance to travel in those days: Breadalbane, Dalesville, Hull, and Clarence. Among the stated aims of this Association were the deepening of the ties of fellowship between those “Baptist churches as agree in holding the sentiments commonly called Evangelical” as well as “the advance [of] the cause of Christ”. For the latter, it was stressed, a certain type of man was needed: “Men of deep personal piety – of compassion for ruined undying souls, strong as power, yet tender as a mother’s heart – of love to Christ, which glows with unceasing ardour – of holy, harmless zeal, which never tires – of humility, that sinks into the insignificance of a cypher – of moral courage, which meets difficulties, insurmountable to others, as little things…”

history

Michael Haykin

We live in the age of the dilettante, when everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s.

The obvious problem with this approach to knowledge is that while in certain spheres it might be valid, in the vast amount of knowledge that we now have it is a recipe for obscurantism and the dissemination of ignorance.

history

Michael Haykin

Recently, the skull of Thomas Aquinas (1225‒1274), one of the most significant theologians of the medieval era, was on tour throughout the United States in a brand-new reliquary. Those who promoted this tour were convinced that viewing a relic like this one helps to draw you closer to God.

The origin of such a conviction goes back to the millennium that we commonly denote as the Middle Ages. So important and so powerful were such relics – usually reputed body parts of those regarded to have lived exemplary holy lives, ‘the saints’ – during this era that it has been aptly described as a thousand years of the veneration of these objects.

history

Michael Haykin

The 19th century was an era of great emigration from Britain and Ireland. Of the four major people groups from this collection of islands – the English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh – the last-named were the least represented among these emigrants.

For example, the population sizes of Wales and Ireland during this era were not too different, but the Irish emigrated in their millions while the Welsh left Wales only in tens of thousands. One key reason for this difference in numbers of emigrants was the mid-19th-century development of South Wales into one of the world’s leading industrial centres. One Welshman who did leave his native land, though, was Benjamin Daniel Thomas (1843–1917), who left Wales in the autumn of 1868.

history

Michael Haykin

Who was Friedrich Weißler? He was born of German Jewish stock on 28 April 1891, in Königshütte in what was then Upper Silesia, now part of Poland.

While an infant his parents embraced the Protestant faith and so Weißler was baptised as a Protestant. By the outbreak of World War I, Weißler had completed his law studies and gained a doctorate in law. During that war, he served as a lieutenant in the German army. Upon its close, he returned to the field of law, passing the equivalent of the bar exam in 1920 and being appointed an assistant judge in Halle in 1922. That same year he was married to Hanna Schäfer and the couple had two sons. In 1932 Weißler became director of the regional court in the central German city of Magdeburg.

history

Michael Haykin

Historically, Trowbridge in Wiltshire was a seedbed of Protestant Dissent. And one of the key vehicles of that dissent in this market town was the Tabernacle Church, a Congregationalist product of the First Great Awakening.

Central in the founding of this work was Joanna Turner (1732–1784), an ardent Methodist who was irrepressible in sharing the gospel and indefatigable in her efforts to extend the rule of Christ. After using her home as a house-church, she paid £500 for a small chapel to be built. This was later replaced by a meeting-house that was built in 1771 and measured 40 feet by 30 feet, which Joanna and her husband mostly funded. It was named the Tabernacle, after George Whitefield’s famous meeting-house in London. The church’s first minister (pictured) was John Clark (1746–1808).

history

Michael Haykin

Ownership, a recently published book by Sean McGever on the serious failings of some key 18th-century evangelicals, namely George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards with regard to the issue of slavery, has been a great reminder of the fact that our heroes from that era were human beings like ourselves – broken and bent. And yet, there were some, thank God, who were steadfast in their denunciation of both slavery and slave trade.

One such figure was Abraham Booth (1734–1806), who has appeared on a couple of earlier occasions in this column. He was widely admired within the Particular Baptist denomination, the Christian community among which he ministered for most of his life. Benjamin Beddome, the great Baptist hymnwriter of the 18th century, is said to have exclaimed: ‘Oh, that Abraham Booth’s God may be my God’. Andrew Fuller, another Baptist leader of that era, once described Booth as ‘the first counsellor’ of their denomination.

history

Michael Haykin

Brilliana Harley (1598-1643) was a prolific letter writer. Close to 400 of her letters written from 1623 until her death in October 1643 have survived. They provide a detailed picture of her married life with husband Robert, the outbreak of the Civil War in Herefordshire, and the life of a family at odds with local political sentiment. The majority of these letters are to her eldest son Edward, or Ned, as she calls him.

Edward Harley (1624 –1700), Brilliana and Robert’s eldest son, went up to Magdalen Hall at Oxford University in 1638, which was to Oxford what Emmanuel College was to Cambridge, namely, a seedbed for Puritanism.

history

Michael Haykin

Brilliana Harley (1598-1643) was born in 1598 at the seaport of Brill (after which she was named), near Rotterdam, daughter of Edward Conway and Dorothy Tracy Conway.

Among her ancestors were royalty, including William I and Henry II. Her father, Sir Edward Conway (later Viscount Conway), was the Governor of Brill at the time of her birth, hence her unique name. Brill was one of three so-called ‘Cautionary Towns’, key seaports in the Dutch Republic that had been garrisoned by English troops from 1585 onwards when the English aided the Dutch in their fight against the domination of the Spanish in what is known as the Eighty Years War or the Dutch Revolt (1566/1568–1648). They were governed as English colonies – hence the role of Brilliana’s father as the Governor of Brielle – and were eventually returned to the Dutch Republic in 1616.

history

Michael Haykin

In the very early 370s, an elder by the name of Palladius moved from the church in Caesarea in Cappadocia to live at a monastic community located on the Mount of Olives.

Among the members of this community was a certain Innocent, who was well known to Athanasius (c.299–373), the bishop of Alexandria, a legend in his own time due to his ardent defence of the full deity of Christ. It may well have been this contact with Innocent that prompted Palladius to write to the Egyptian pastor-theologian about a concern that vexed him. It had to do with the bishop of his home church, namely, Basil of Caesarea (c.330–379), as well-known today as Athanasius.

history

Michael Haykin

I have long believed that significant care must be taken when using the word ‘heresy’.

It is causally thrown around with, it appears to me, little reflection on the implications of its assignation. If I say someone is teaching heresy, then I am calling that person a heretic. And heresy is a damnable sin (see 2 Peter 2:1; cf. 1 Timothy 4:1-5).

history

Michael Haykin

The German Reformer Martin Luther was insistent that our salvation is based upon faith alone.

‘Faith alone, … before works, and without works, appropriates the benefits of redemption, which is nothing other than justification, or deliverance from sin.’ Given such a theological affirmation, there have been some who have argued that Luther’s view of saving faith inevitably leads to indifference to good works. But this is a very unjust accusation.

history

Michael Haykin

‘One of the greatest blows to the kingdom of Satan in the history of the church’ is the way that the New England divine Jonathan Edwards once described it. His English evangelical contemporary, John Wesley, strongly disagreed however. He maintained that it initiated an age of iron, of doctrinal and spiritual compromise and weakened the church.

What were they talking about? None other than the formal embrace of Christianity by the Roman emperor Constantine and his clear favouring of the church in legal policies that he enacted after his 312 victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge over the pagan Maxentius.

history

Michael Haykin

Sherwood Wirt, the editor of Decision, the magazine of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called it ‘one of the great monumental literary achievements of the 20th century’.

The book in question? Arnold A. Dallimore’s two-volume Life of George Whitefield (1714- 1770). This work literally made Dallimore’s name a beloved one throughout English-speaking Evangelical and Reformed circles.

history

Michael Haykin

As we noted in last month’s column, Benjamin Beddome, the 18th-century Baptist pastor, was in the habit of preparing a hymn to be sung at the close of the morning worship service, which would pick up the theme of his sermon.

Given this sermonic link of the vast majority of Beddome’s hymns it is not surprising to find that many of them are strongly doctrinal.

history

Michael Haykin

Over the past two months, we have been considering the pastoral ministry of Benjamin Beddome at Bourton-on-the-Water.

In the first 15 years or so of his ministry, the church knew revival. But during the 1750s and the first half of the 1760s the numerical growth of the church began to slow. In 1751 the total number of members stood at 180. Between 1752 and 1754 none were added to the church and 15 members were lost through death. In 1755, though, there were 22 individuals who came into the membership of the church by baptism. Another year which saw a large accession to the church was 1764, when 28 new members were added. A good number must have died since the mid-1750s, for in that year the membership stood at 183. But the next 30 years of his ministry saw a decline in the church membership. And by 1795, the year that Beddome died, the church had 123 on the membership roll, 60 less than in 1764.

history

Michael Haykin

Benjamin Beddome, whose life and ministry we began to look at last month, first visited Bourton-on-the-Water in the spring of 1740.

Over the next three years he laboured with great success in the Bourton church. Significant for the shape of his future ministry was a local revival that took place under his ministry in the early months of 1741. Around 40 individuals were converted, including John Collett Ryland, a leading Baptist minister in the latter half of the 18th century, now chiefly remembered for a stinging rebuke he gave to young William Carey.

history

Michael Haykin

For some odd reason, I am drawn to the lives of Christians who can only be regarded as obscure or marginal to the main story of Christianity that is usually told in our church history books.

So, for example, I am currently writing a life of Benjamin Beddome (1718–1795), who pastored a Baptist work in the village of Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds for over 50 years. The English historian A.C. Underwood well described him as a ‘Calvinist of the best type’, passionate in preaching, ardent in prayer for revival, eager for the conversion of the lost, and the strengthening of his people.

history

Michael Haykin

One of the key aspects of the backdrop of the gospel accounts of the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus in Palestine is Roman rule.

It is there at the beginning of the story, with Augustus Caesar passing a decree to take a census of all within the Empire (Luke 2:1). Our Lord’s ministry begins, we are told, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (14 –37 AD), the son of Augustus’ wife from a previous marriage. And it is there at the end of the story when, during the reign of Tiberius, Jesus is crucified.

history

Michael Haykin

The Jewish Rabbis in the second century after the birth of Christ liked to imagine Rome standing before the judgment seat of God in the last days.

When the Lord God asks them to account for their rapacious wars and conquests, the Romans reply: ‘Lord of the world, we have established many markets, we have built many baths, we have increased much silver and gold, and we have done all this simply that the Israelites might study the Torah without distraction’. The plea is of course brushed aside. The Lord who searches the hearts knows the real reason: hedonistic self-enjoyment and lust for power were the real reasons. Jewish hatred for Roman rule is well known. But this story is grudging admission of the achievements of the Pax Romana that was at its height in the second century AD.

history

Michael Haykin

In the minds of some Roman authors, like the first-century BC imperial poet Virgil, Roman rule of the Mediterranean was a gift of the gods to the Roman people.

Early Christians, though, saw it through the eyes of the Biblical understanding of history: it was the Sovereign Lord of history, the God who had revealed Himself definitively in Jesus Christ, who had ultimately caused the political dominance of Rome to take place. And he had done so through a variety of what we call secondary causes.

history

Michael Haykin

Here are ten good reasons why we should know what has gone before us.

1. God takes history seriously. Consider how much of the Old and New Testament is historical narrative. In its very being Christianity is deeply rooted in historical events, like the call of Abraham, the ministry of the Prophets, and the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ.

history

Michael Haykin

A number of years ago I was invited to give two talks at a major Reformed conference in America.

I was thrilled by the invitation as I had enormous respect – and still do, I need to add – for the ministry behind the conference.

history

Michael Haykin

Although Richard Greenham of Dry Drayton, whom we met last month, was well known and appreciated as a gospel preacher, it was as a pastoral counsellor that Greenham excelled.

His 20th-century biographer John Primus has argued persuasively that in this area Greenham was ‘an ecclesiastical titan who used his extraordinary gifts to make enormous contributions to God’s church and kingdom’.

history

Michael Haykin

The last 50 years have seen a profuse flowering of books and articles on English Puritanism, its leaders, its theology, and its social and political impact.

Yet, even so, one occasionally comes across certain significant individuals who have been largely overlooked. Richard Greenham (c.1540/45–94) certainly falls into this category.

history

Michael Haykin

One of the hallmarks of Evangelicalism is its insistence on the necessity of conversion. But this is, of course, not unique to the Evangelical movement.

Did not the North African pioneer of Christian Latin, Tertullian, make the same point thus: ‘The soul is not born Christian; it becomes Christian’?

history

Michael Haykin

Hugh Dunlop Brown’s (1858–1918) friendship with C.H. Spurgeon through the desperate days of the Downgrade Controversy over the Scriptures in the 1880s made him a witness to the toll that this controversy took on the London Baptist minister.

The Downgrade Controversy was when Spurgeon aired concerns about the Baptist Union in relation to Scripture, the atonement, hell and universalism. He withdrew from the denomination in 1887 as a result.

history

Michael Haykin

It would have been in the late 1880s, when the ministry of C. H. Spurgeon was drawing to a close, that a Dubliner by the name of Hugh Dunlop Brown (1858–1918) attended worship at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle with a few thousand other men and women and children.

As Spurgeon came to preach he caught sight of Brown in the congregation and immediately exclaimed: ‘I see my friend Brown from Dublin; will he please come round and help me.’ One can well imagine that it was a rare occasion for Spurgeon to invite a man out of the vast audiences that attended on his preaching to help him in the pulpit. But then Hugh Brown was a remarkable man, though I dare say his name has been forgotten a little over a century since his stepping into heaven.

history

Michael Haykin

On 14 February 2014, Bob Shaker, just shy of 100 years old by exactly a month, went to be with his Lord, the Lord Christ.

Bob and his four sisters and a couple of brothers, were originally from Syria and were raised in the Syrian Orthodox Church. He came to faith as a young man at Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and was discipled under the famous fundamentalist preacher T.T. Shields (1873–1955). Bob went on to serve as one of the deacons at Jarvis Street during the 1950s.

history

Michael Haykin

The 16th-century Reformation is often remembered as a rediscovery of the heart of the gospel and the way of salvation, but it was also a recovery of a Biblical view of marriage and sex.

The medieval Roman Catholic Church had affirmed the goodness of marriage, but at the same time argued that celibacy was a much better option for those wanting to pursue a life of holiness and serve God vocationally. Many medieval authors had problems especially with marital intercourse for pleasure.

history

Michael Haykin

Real-life heroes are not in style in contemporary Western culture.

Ours has become a culture of cynicism and shaming, one in which heroes have no place. Even the traditional comic-book heroes like Batman and Captain America (two of my personal favourites when I was a young teenager!) have become troubled, deeply-flawed individuals.

history

Michael Haykin

When Jonathan Edwards was ministering at Stockbridge, he encouraged his son, the future theologian-pastor Jonathan Edwards, Jr., to spend time learning the culture and language of the Oneida.

The boy went with a missionary, Gideon Hawley, to an Oneida village at the head of the Susquehanna, about 200 miles away from his family. The young boy was here from April 1755 to mid-January 1756. What amazing confidence the senior Edwards and his wife Sarah must have had in a sovereign God to send their son into such a potentially dangerous place!

history

Michael Haykin

In a recent statement regarding some of the cultural turmoil in North America, historian Owen Strachan, the Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, made an observation about church history that I found quite surprising. He noted that ‘epic stands for truth … are usually taken alone, so high is their cost’.

I found it quite surprising because my own study of church history has given me a fundamentally different perspective. It is a perspective that I have learned inductively from church history (be it the Apostolic era with the Pauline circle, or the Cappadocian Fathers, or the Celtic Church, or the Reformers, or the Puritan brotherhood, or the Evangelical revivals of the 18th century), and it is namely this: God never does a great work in the history of the church except through a band of brothers and sisters.

history

Michael Haykin

When did Evangelicalism as a movement emerge?

Is it a relative newbie, as some would assert, a creation of the 1940s out of the ruins of Fundamentalism or is it even more recent, a product of the Sixties? Or does it have much older roots?

history

Michael Haykin

The name of the stone merchant Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) is known today to few beyond the circle of architectural historians.

But in her day, hers was a name that bespoke excellence. Eleanor owned a highly-successful, artificial stone factory in Lambeth, London, which bore her name.

history

Michael Haykin

One of the most influential Europeans in the past two millennia has to be Benedict of Nursia.

He was born in Italy around 480 when the Ostrogoths ruled the peninsula, and died in 547 at the monastery he founded at Monte Cassino. He established an order of monks and gave them a rule of life that shaped the world of medieval monasticism till the rise of the Franciscans and the Dominicans in the 13th century.

history

Michael Haykin

In the midst of her controversy with the London pastor William Huntington over the gospel and the law, the Particular Baptist authoress and hymn writer Maria de Fleury made a telling point.

She rightly noted: ‘Angry passions and bitter words ought never to be brought into the field of religious controversy; they can neither ornament nor discover truth, but they can grieve and quench that Holy Spirit, in whose light alone we can see light, and without whose divine illuminations, we shall walk in darkness.’

history

Michael Haykin

The Bible is bound up with history in many ways. One of them is the basic way that the Bible has come down to us.

The most prominent medium by which the Scriptures were recorded for us was on papyrus, which is largely unique to the Nile Delta in Egypt and began to be used for writing books as far back as the third millennium BC.

history

Michael Haykin

Over the past two centuries, there has been a steady recession of the social role of fatherhood. Fathers have either gradually moved or been moved from the heart to the margins of family life.

Overall, the cultural story of fatherhood in the West has been essentially downhill since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries. But at the outset of the 18th century, fathers were regarded as primary and irreplaceable caregivers in the family.

history

Michael Haykin

At the outset of his invasion of Scotland in the summer of 1650, Oliver Cromwell remarked that theological disagreements (and surely he is thinking in part of the differences among the English and Scottish Puritans that had led them to war) are endemic to the life of the church in a world marred by sin.

Disagreements are a sad reality with which Christians have to contend. Nonetheless, Christians can control the way that they participate in such disputes.

history

Michael Haykin

On 18 April, 1521, almost exactly 500 years ago, Martin Luther experienced what was probably the most dangerous moment of his entire life.

He had been asked to appear before the Holy Roman Emperor, the Spaniard Charles V, at the imperial Parliament (Diet) which had been called to meet at Worms, which was situated on the Upper Rhine, about 40 miles south of Frankfurt.

history

Michael Haykin

When William Carey drew up his paradigm-changing book An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens in 1792, he included a mini-history of missions.

He cited examples of missionaries passionate for the expansion of the rule of Christ. In this mini-history, he referenced a remarkable missions-minded community, the Moravians. Carey’s words about this 18th-century body of believers are tantalisingly brief, but indicative of their influence upon him. ‘When I came to evangelism and missions,’ Carey noted, ‘none of the moderns have equalled the Moravian Brethren in this good work’.

history

Michael Haykin

In recent days, I have been again impressed with the significance of a name that was well-known among British evangelicals in the last decades of the long 18th century, but today is mostly forgotten, namely, that of Abraham Booth (1734–1806).

The son of a Nottinghamshire farmer, Booth became a stocking weaver in his teens. He had no formal schooling and was compelled to teach himself to read and to write. His early Christian experience was spent among the General, i.e. Arminian, Baptists, but by 1768 he had undergone a complete revolution in his soteriology and had become a Calvinist. Not long after this embrace of Calvinism he wrote The Reign of Grace, from Its Rise to Its Consummation (1768), which the 20th-century Scottish theologian John Murray regarded as ‘one of the most eloquent and moving expositions of the subject of divine grace in the English language’.

history

Michael Haykin

Whether or not a person could know with certainty that he or she was saved from divine judgment and divine wrath has been a controversial issue in the history of the church.

The New Testament writers assume that it is part and parcel of the normal Christian experience (see, for example, 1 John 3:14). During the Middle Ages, however, Thomas Aquinas bracketed this experience as extraordinary, and argued that only a special revelation from God could give assurance.